Thursday, January 31, 2008

cygwin cron on Win2K/XP

Well, setting up Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) cron on Win2K Server and my XP workstation is a complete bitch. Simply put, my scripts would not start properly. I used the latest version of the Cygwin DLL, v.1.5.25-7.

Why?
In a nutshell, my problems came down to three issues:
1) cron would only work as my local domain account
-lots of good information here: http://www.andrewlouie.com/wordpress/?page_id=88
-and a little bit of info here: http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-switch
2) cron needed to be installed using "smbntsec" privileges for my SSH-based scripts to work
3) finally, c:\cygwin\bin needed to be the last entry in my PATH enviroment variable

Installation Steps Added 3/1/2008
Most of the following information comes from these gentlemens' fine posts:
-http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-switch
-http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~kscully/CygwinSSHD_W2K3.html

The overview is that you'll have to do quite a bit to get cron under cygwin running properly. Please refer to the two docs above, but here is the short list of steps:
1) decide on a user that cron will run under
- we have a domain account used for scheduled tasks, so I used that
2) add the user to /etc/passwd
- setup a proper home directory in /etc/passwd
- if you do not have a proper home directory, you'll see "Can't cd to $HOME" errors from the output of cronevents.exe
- copy valid .bashrc/.bash_profile files to your users' home directory
3) under Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Local Security Policy -> Local Policies -> User Rights Assignment -> tweak your Win2K/XP Local Security Policy settings to add the chosen user to
- (Adjust Memory Quotas for a Process) Increase Quotas
- Create a Token Object
- Log on As A Service
- Replace Process Level Token
4) create a crontab for your user
- crontab -e
5) verify that the permissions on the command(s) to be cron'd will allow the user you've chosen to execute the command(s)
6) run cron-config to enable the cron daemon
- you may get execute and write errors related to permissions on /var, /var/run, /var/log, /usr/sbin/sendmail, /usr/bin/cronlog. I took the easy route and fixed them with:
chmod 766 [file or directory]
or
chmod 755 [file or directory]

Also, make sure the user that you will be using to execute cron jobs is setup in /etc/passwd.

6) once the cron daemon is running, validate that your script is running properly by looking at cronevents.exe and $HOME/cron.log
- if you have not applied the Local Policy settings correctly, you may see the "can't switch user context" error in the log output
- at one point, I received this error:
C:\cygwin\usr\sbin\cron.exe: *** fatal error - could not load user32, Win32 error 1114

I resolved this by moving my user from the "guest" group to the "Administrators" group in /etc/passwd. Of course, you may not want to do this based on your security needs.

troubleshooting
I learned a few things along the way:
1) after installing the cron package into Cygwin, you want to use cron-config to setup cron
2) after enabling your cron, cronevents.exe is a good thing
3) occasionally, $HOME/cron.log provides some useful info
4) the CYGWIN environment variable can be a nasty beast:
http://www.cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-cygwinenv.html
5) the HOME environment variable must be set properly:
http://blog.spikesource.com/crontab.htm suggests running "env" in your cron out to a file to find differences between your user environment and the cron environment. Good idea!
6) don't forget your scripting basics:
/2007/07/why-doesnt-my-shell-script-run-under.html
7) documentation can help:
C:\cygwin\usr\share\doc\Cygwin\cron-4.1-6.README

Detail
1) after you install the cron packages from the CygWin setup program, make sure to use "cron-config" to add or remove the cron daemon as an NT service, and perform configuration of cron.

I needed to run the service as myself, with the security tweaks described in both these places:
-http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/ntsec.html#ntsec-switch
-http://www.andrewlouie.com/wordpress/?page_id=88

Here's a sample of the installer dialog:
$ cron-config
Cron is already installed as a service under account DOMAIN\USER.
Do you want to remove or reinstall it? (yes/no) yes
OK. The cron service was removed.

Do you want to install the cron daemon as a service? (yes/no) yes
Enter the value of CYGWIN for the daemon: [ntsec smbntsec] smbntsec

The service can run either as yourself or under a privileged account.
Running as yourself allows better access to network drives,
but does not allow to run the crontab of other users.
Do you want to the cron daemon to run as yourself? (yes/no) yes

Please enter the password for user 'SODO':
Reenter:
Running cron_diagnose ...
... no problem found.

Do you want to start the cron daemon as a service now? (yes/no) yes
OK. The cron daemon is now running.

In case of problem, examine the log file for cron,
/var/log/cron.log, and the Windows event log (using /usr/bin/cronevents)
for information about the problem cron is having.

Examine also any cron.log file in the HOME directory
(or the file specified in MAILTO) and cron related files in /tmp.

If you cannot fix the problem, then report it to cygwin@cygwin.com.
Please run the script /usr/bin/cronbug and ATTACH its output
(the file cronbug.txt) to your e-mail.


Occasionally, cron-config may bark at you for permissions errors on /etc/group and /etc/passwd. Fix them and then re-run cron-config.

Event Log Errors
If I ran the cron daemon under the SYSTEM user context, I got the following Application Event log error:
The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( /usr/sbin/cron ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: /usr/sbin/cron: PID 5300: (CRON) error (can't cd to HOME).

After a proper install, I still see a running set of Information Alerts in the Application logs. These don't seem to hurt, as my jobs still runs:
The description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( /usr/sbin/cron ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: /usr/sbin/cron: PID 5016: (SODO) CMD (/scheduledtasks/scripts/load.sh ).

2) Setup your cron using "crontab -e". This puts you into the edit window of the text editor that you installed with Cygwin.

Once a cron is setup, view the output of cronevents.exe to see what cron jobs executed:
$ cronevents.exe tail
2008/01/31 16:53:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 5992: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/load.sh >> /scripts/load.txt )
2008/01/31 16:53:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 6652: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connScript.sh >> /scripts/conn.txt)
2008/01/31 16:54:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 8132: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/load.sh >> /scripts/load.txt )
2008/01/31 16:54:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 4708: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connScript.sh >> /scripts/conn.txt)
2008/01/31 16:55:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 8164: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connDiff.sh)
2008/01/31 16:55:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 3372: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connAlert.sh )
2008/01/31 16:55:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 4460: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/load.sh >> /scripts/load.txt )
2008/01/31 16:55:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 7976: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connScript.sh >> /scripts/conn.txt)
2008/01/31 16:56:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 6424: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/load.sh >> /scripts/load.txt )
2008/01/31 16:56:01 [SODO] /usr/sbin/cron: PID 2676: (SODO) CMD (/scripts/connScript.sh >> /scripts/conn.txt)


3) Viewing the cron logs are important! The cron.log is place in $HOME/cron.log:
$ cat /cygdrive/h/cron.logThis file was written by the /usr/bin/cronlog script on 20080131_165003
From: root (Cron Daemon)To: SODOSubject: Cron
SODO@SODO02 /scripts/connDiff.sh

X-Cron-Env: ALLUSERSPROFILE=C:\Documents and Settings\All Users
X-Cron-Env: COMMONPROGRAMFILES=C:\Program Files\Common Files
X-Cron-Env: COMPUTERNAME=SODO02X-Cron-Env: COMSPEC=C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe
X-Cron-Env: CYGWIN=smbntsecX-Cron-Env: NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS=4
X-Cron-Env: OS=Windows_NTX-Cron-Env: PATH=/cygdrive/c/Program Files/PHP/:/cygdrive/c/oracle9i/bin:/cygdrive/c/oracle9i/jre/1.4.2/bin/client:/cygdrive/c/oracle9i/jre/1.4.2/bin:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Oracle/jre/1.1.8/bin:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/system32:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS:/cygdrive/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/TeaLeaf:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Python25:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/QuickTime/QTSystem/:"C:/Program Files/Symantec/Norton Ghost 2003/":/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Common Files/Adaptec Shared/System:/usr/bin:/cygdrive/c/Program Files/SSH Communications Security/SSH Secure Shell:/bin
X-Cron-Env: PATHEXT=.COM;.EXE;.BAT;.CMD;.VBS;.VBE;.JS;.JSE;.WSF;.WSH
X-Cron-Env: PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE=x86
X-Cron-Env: PROCESSOR_IDENTIFIER=x86 Family 15 Model 4 Stepping 3, GenuineIntel
X-Cron-Env: PROCESSOR_LEVEL=15X-Cron-Env: PROCESSOR_REVISION=0403
X-Cron-Env: PROGRAMFILES=C:\Program FilesX-Cron-Env: SYSTEMDRIVE=C:
X-Cron-Env: SYSTEMROOT=C:\WINDOWS
X-Cron-Env: TMP=/cygdrive/c/DOCUME~1/SODO/LOCALS~1/Temp
X-Cron-Env: TEMP=/cygdrive/c/DOCUME~1/SODO/LOCALS~1/Temp
X-Cron-Env: WINDIR=C:\WINDOWSX-Cron-Env: SHELL=/bin/sh
X-Cron-Env: HOME=//SAN/Users$/SODO
X-Cron-Env: LOGNAME=SODO

4) My scripts do such things as SSH into other boxes and grab HTTP connection counts. The scripts only ran using the CYGWIN environment variable set to smbntsec.


5) the HOME environment variable must be set properly: http://blog.spikesource.com/crontab.htm suggests running "env" in your cron out to a file to find differences between your user environment and the cron environment. Good idea!

6) don't forget your scripting basics:
/2007/07/why-doesnt-my-shell-script-run-under.html

7) documentation can help:
C:\cygwin\usr\share\doc\Cygwin\cron-4.1-6.README


Or whatever the latest version happens to be..

Mail That Cron Sends

Change the email that cron sends error messages to:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-crontab-change-mailto-settings/
or
run cron-config
or
Add/edit the "From:" address in /etc/ssmtp.conf

Hope these tips help!
sodo

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

couldn't set file permissions in Cygwin

Here's a little tidbit that might help someone. I was configuring my public and private keys to allow secure SSH communications between my workstation and a server (see /2007/08/eliminating-need-to-enter-your-password.html for more details). The workstation is an XP box running Cygwin and the server is a Linux variant. When I went to test ssh, I got the following error in Cygwin from the XP box that denied access to the private key:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Permissions 0644 for '/cygdrive/h/.ssh/id_rsa' are too open.
It is recommended that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.
bad permissions: ignore key: /cygdrive/h/.ssh/id_rsa
Password:

Woops. I guess that's my fault. Looking at the file permissions, I see that id_rsa perms are too loose:
bash-2.02$ ls -l id_rsa
-rw-r--r-- 1 28235 everyone 1675 Jan 30 15:33 id_rsa

I issued the following chmod command:
bash-2.02$ chmod 600 id_rsa
bash-2.02$ ls -l id_rsa
-rw-r--r-- 1 28235 everyone 1675 Jan 30 15:33 id_rsa

But the permissions stayed the same. What gives? Why aren't the permissions changing?

Apparently, Cygwin has two ways to deal with file permissions. Here's the explanation:
http://www.iu.hio.no/cfengine/docs/cfengine-NT/node24.html

The short answer, though, is that I was able to solve my problem by setting this environment variable in /Cygnus/cygwin-b20/cygnus.bat:
set CYGWIN=ntea

Once I set that environment variable in the batch script and restarted a new Cygwin shell, I was able to set the permissions correctly:
bash-2.02$ chmod 600 id_rsa
bash-2.02$ ls -l id_rsa
-rw------- 1 28235 everyone 1675 Jan 30 15:33 id_rsa

Update 2/8/2008
I also got bollucksed with id_rsa permissions if my user's NT permissions on the file were not Full Control. So watch out for that as well.

Live and learn!
sodo

Thursday, January 24, 2008

using regular expressions in Oracle

I needed to select rows of data from a column where some of the records begin with a date in the form:
YYYYMMDD

The other records in the column had random text strings. For example:
N MESSAGE
- -------
1 20080124: Hello. I have written to you today to compliment you
2 I have a problem with one of the products you sell.

I thought it would be perfect to use regular expressions to pluck out only the records I needed. Luckily, Oracle now supports for regular expressions as of version 10G:
Writing Better SQL Using Regular Expressions

I needed to first create the regular expression to match the date. In simple terms, I want to match the eight-digit string.

First, here is a regular expression that matches any digit, 0-9:
[0-9]

Secondly, we can expand this match to include the entire eight digit date:
[0-9]\{8\}

The escaped braces repeat the initial match for any number eight ("8") times. I will then put a carat (^) in front of the regular expression to match the beginning of the pattern buffer. The pattern buffer in this case is the MESSAGE column in our table:
^[0-9]\{8\}

OK! So we have our regular expression. Let's put it in a SELECT statement. We will use Oracle 10Gs new regexp_like condition to perform a regular expression match:
SELECT n,message
FROM message_table
WHERE regexp_like (message, '^[0-9]\{8\}');

N MESSAGE
- -------
1 20080124: Hello. I have written to you today to compliment you

Sweet! This works.

There is a slight problem. I did notice a substantial performance penalty for using regexp_like. For a very small table (<20,000 rows), it took about a minute to return the results of the search. Eeek. A normal WHERE clause came back in less than a second.

If I have any further information regarding performance tuning using regular expressions in Oracle, I will let you know.

Here are some more complex examples

TAG

Sunday, January 06, 2008

Belkin F5U503 firewire mishap

Though it may seem so, not all tasks computing are an easily digestible banquet for Cacasodo. Yes, there are high points of success, but like many the intrepid engineer, there are more failures than success. In this light will I tell you my tale of frustration.

It began with a simple goal: to optimize my video editing by installing a firewire card using the PCIX slot of my Dell SC1430. As my one and only PCI slot was used by my Sil680 RAID card, I wanted to install a firewire card in one of the two PCIX slots in the box. And of course, the card had to work under Fedora. As a precursor to the story, I will say that I have a DLink PCI firewire card and that card works without error in the box. But my purpose was to have the RAID card use the one and only PCI slot and the Belkin in one of the PCIX slots so both could live happily in the same home. Alas, I did not know the hell that awaited me in trying to make this happen.

It started as a hasty, unresearched purchase of a Belkin F5U503 firewire card. After my purchase was made, I was told by a friend to avoid the Belkin cards, as Belkin was a known OEM reseller who used substandard parts. Cold comfort that was after the fact, but I digress.

I brought the card home and installed it in the first PCIX slot of the Dell. The Belkin has three connectors that allow it to fit in either PCIX slot of my box:
http://www.staples.com/sbd/img/cat/std/s0057708_std.jpg

Here's a pic of my server's motherboard:
http://dcse.dell.com/IFR/PowerEdge/PESC1430/images/sysbrd_full.jpg

When I installed the card in the PCIX slot, here's what happened. Dmesg gives me this error:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# dmesg | grep 1394
ohci1394: fw-host0: OHCI-1394 1.1 (PCI): IRQ=[38]
MMIO=[fc5ff800-fc5fffff] Max Packet=[2048] IR/IT contexts=[4/8]
ohci1394: fw-host0: Get PHY Reg timeout [0x000004c0/0x00000000/100]

ohci1394: fw-host0: Get PHY Reg timeout [0x000004c0/0x00000000/100]


I get a couple more errors in dmesg once I turn the cam on:
ieee1394: hpsb_update_config_rom() is deprecated
ieee1394: Failed to generate Configuration ROM image for host 0


lsmod reads:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# lsmod | grep 1394
ohci1394 43273 0 ieee1394 109081 1 ohci1394


lspci reads:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# lspci | grep 1394
06:06.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)


after probing for raw1394:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# modprobe raw1394
[cacasodo ogre ~]# lsmod | grep 1394
raw1394 37233 0 ohci1394 43273 0 ieee1394 109081 2 raw1394,ohci1394


I am running Fedora 7 and my kernel is the EZPlanet firewire patch kernel. I use this patched kernel because firewire is broken in Fedora 7's standard build:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# uname -r
2.6.22.9-1091.ez.fc7


I do see interrupt activity when I connect and turn on the cam:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# grep 1394 /proc/interrupts
38: 2 0 0 0 1 0
0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi ohci1394


testlibraw gives me something:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# testlibraw
successfully got handle

current generation number: 1
1 card(s)
found
nodes on bus: 0,
card name: ohci1394

using first card found: 0 nodes on bus, local ID is 0, IRM is 63


But plugreport doesn't give me anything:
[cacasodo ogre ~]# plugreport
Host Adapter 0 ==============


Adding "noacpi", "noapic" and "nolapic" to my grub.conf and rebooting didn't help.

To see if it was kernel related, I tried booting using these other distros/kernels, with the same result..the "Get PHY Reg timeout" error:
Ubuntu 6.10 -> 2.6.17-10 kernel
Knoppix -> 2.6.19 kernel
Fedora 6 -> 2.6.18-1.2798 kernel

OK. I am almost spent for the evening. But does the card even work in the PCI slot? I put the card in the PCI slot and lo and behold, the card DOES work. To reiterate, the card does work in the PCI slot, just not in either of the PCIX slots. At this point I'm thinking that the card is not getting proper power, but I'm too tired to continue on. I sleep uneasily.

The next day, I take fifteen minutes to call Belkin. The gentleman on the line is helpful, but when I tell him I'm running Linux, I get the cold shoulder and he dismisses me with the "we don't support the card under Linux" line. Well, if the card works fine in one slot under Linux, why shouldn't it work in the other slot?! No matter, "we don't support the card under Linux."

Argh. So here is where I dive off into the deep end to set out to prove Belkin wrong that it is a power issue and not an OS issue. I went on Belkin's support site and tried to find the voltage requirements for the card. I could not. I searched on google and not so amazingly, I find a link to the voltage requirements ON BELKIN'S OWN SITE!
http://web.belkin.com/support/kb/kb.asp?a=3742&langid=

Great search engine there, Belkin! NOT! As well, I look on Dell's site for the voltage of the PCIX slots:
  • 2 64-bit/100MHz PCI-X slots 3.3V

The slots handle 3.3volts. Referring back to the Belkin KB article, it states clearly:
The F5U503 PCI requires a 5 volt PCI slot.

I knew it! Now, in order to prove Belkin wrong, I decide to get a Windows OS running on the Dell and show them that it is a POWER issue and NOT an OS related issue!

To do this, I'd install an older IDE drive in the Dell and apply an old Ghost image I had of XP. Well, the Dell doesn't have a floppy drive. So, I power down my web server, take the floppy out, install it in the Dell and reconfigure the BIOS to allow the floppy to be seen. OK. I try one of my Ghost floppies. It doesn't boot. I try a second and a third. They do not boot as well. Argh.

Wouldn't it be great if Ghost worked on a bootable CD? Unfortunately, Norton doesn't provide that option. But an enterprising person has a lovely install doc written up here:
http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/bootcdintro.html

Thank you, Nightowl! Though, it did take me a number of hours to setup the Ghost bootable disk, it was well worth the time as I now have reliable boot media for Ghost. The process itself could use a small blog entry. Nightowl did a great job, but he needs better formatting and less verbiage to make the instructions easier to follow.

Next, I used it to boot and apply a Ghost image of my XP system to that older hard drive I mentioned. But when I bootup, Ghost does not recognize the DVD disc. I try another disc that has an earlier Ghost image. Ghost also does not recognize that disc. Finally, I have a third DVD. Luckily, Ghost recognizes that disc. Unfortunately, when I go to apply the image, Ghost cannot find the IDE hard drive. What the hell? I see the drive in the BIOS, though the BIOS doesn't report back the correct size of the drive. It is the master drive on the IDE controller..what gives?

I tried a few couple configuration options:
-hard drive being slave
-hard drive cable select
-disabling the SATA drives
-changing boot sequence
-refreshing the BIOS version to the latest 1.0.4

None of these worked. Then I thought that if Ghost re-imaging didn't work, I should just install the OS itself. So, I had a bootable copy of the XP disc. I started the system with the disc in the drive, but the install process soon gave me a blue screen with a message regarding pci.sys. Looks like a lot of folks had that one:
http://www.google.com/search?q=xp+professional+install+pci.sys+blue+screen

This problem should be resolved with a disc that integrates XP with SP2 . Which of course, I don't have right now. So for expediancy's sake, I take another route: a Windows 2000 Advanced Server install. I was able to put the extra hard drive in a second machine, start the Win2K install process, but for some reason, the hard drive is not recognized properly by the BIOS. I brought the disk over to my Dell SC400 machine that runs XP. I disconnected the existing XP drive, installed the disk and got Win2K Advanced Server working without a problem. The box boots to that drive, so I know that the Master Boot Record is not corrupt. But when I move the drive back to the SC1430, it refuses to boot.

Not sure what to do at this point. I'd sure like to prove those Belkin support engineers wrong, but I can't get the "Belkin certifed" OS (in this case, Windows 2000 Advanced Server) to boot in the Dell. I assume I will have the same problem with XP SP2, but it might be worth a try.

To sum up:
-card doesn't work in PCIX slot, but I believe it is a simple voltage problem
-I'd like to prove this to Belkin, but I can't get a Windows OS to load via Ghost'ing an existing hard drive or installing a hard drive with a Windows OS on it

Update 1/6/08
Ooops..my bad. Looking in the manual for the Dell SC1430, it shows that pre-Win2003 OSs are not supported. Thereby, I am out $52 for the price I paid for the Belkin card. Just goes to show..DO YOUR RESEARCH before making a purchase of this kind.
!
A Frustrated Cacasodo

Saturday, January 05, 2008

WinAmp under Wine on Fedora 7

Happy 2008, everybody!

This was a nice surprise. I wanted some visualizations with my music, rather than just the plain xmms oscilloscope, so I thought I'd try installing WinAmp under Wine, the Windows Emulator (http://www.winehq.com). I hadn't had very good experiences with Wine before and wasn't confident that my sound hardware would be recognized correctly, especially in my quirky Dell SC1430.

The Dell is a server class machine not made for consumer applications. Though I'm trying my best to convert it into a video editing monster machine. For the most part, I have succeeded in that task. But there has been a lot of bloodletting (read: time spent) in the process.

Currently, I have Fedora 7 running on the Dell. As Wine is part of this Fedora distro, installing Wine was a simple matter of doing:
[cacasodo@ogre ~]# yum install wine

Version wine-0.9.49-1.fc7 got installed from the fedora-updates repository.

After reading a bit on the Wine FAQ, I saw that the installation of Windows programs to the Wine environment should be fairly straightforward. With that in mind, I downloaded the latest WinAmp player. I started the install by using the following command from my home directory, the directory I copied the program to:
[cacasodo@ogre ~]# wine winamp551_basic.exe

I forgot that Wine runs all the Windows applications and dialogs appeared in their own Metacity windows. Wine running WinAmp looks like this:


As I made it through the final dialog box of the installation process, I assumed the program installed correctly. Now, it was time to configure Wine using the Wine configuration program. I typed:
[cacasodo@ogre ~]# winecfg



In winecfg, I made sure that my audio drivers were selected correctly. Upon installation, Wine automatically detected that OSS, ALSA and JACK drivers were installed in my system. They were selected, so I played a test sound. The test sound was garbled and unintelligible. Ooops. I looked at the command output in the terminal window and it showed an ALSA error:
ALSA lib pcm_dmix.c:868:(snd_pcm_dmix_open) unable to open slave

I saw that my other audio applications were similarly broken, so I decided to reboot just for good measure. When the box came back up, I first played a test sound in XMMS. That worked, so I opened winecfg and the test sound played correctly! Happiness.

The real test would be to start 'er up and load an MP3 file. I started WinAmp using the following command:
wine /cacasodo/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Winamp/winamp.exe

WinAmp started up, so I dragged the default Mike Llama wave file from the WinAmp installation folder into the playlist of WinAmp. The drag and drop from Metacity to WinAmp running under Wine worked, which was nice to see. Pressing play, I was happy to hear Mike's dulcid tones..well, not so dulcid..ring out loudly through my speakers. WinAmp was working!!

My original purpose for the WinAmp installation was to have some nice visualizations to go with my music. I was very interested to see if they'd work under Wine. In WinAmp, I went to Preferences by pressing the familiar CTRL-P key combination. Indeed, this opened up a Preferences window. Wine does key combinations..cool! I selected Visualizations -> Advanced Visualization Studio and pressed Start plugin. Lo and behold, another window appeared and even better than that, a visualization started up!

The visualizations were working so well that I could expand the viz window to roughly DVD size resolution (720x480) without it slowing down. Nice! At this point, I knew that Wine must be taking advantage of my NVidia (BFG) 8500GT card. There's no way plain old X could handle those beautiful streaming colors all by itself:


Again, nice going Wine, for taking advantage of the OpenGL in my NVidia chip!

However, I will say there must be some optimization needed in Wine, as a constant flow of error messages comes through in the terminal session:
fixme:ddraw:IDirectDrawImpl_WaitForVerticalBlank (0x1b27ff0)->(1,(nil)): Stub

Aside from that, it is very nice to have an unexpected success like this install of WinAmp and its beautiful visualizations. Tally ho!

For your reference, the WineHQ site has a nice database that shows which Windows applications will work with Wine:
http://appdb.winehq.org/appbrowse.php

In particular, here is the root page describing WinAmp compatibility with Wine:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=5

Very cool.
'sodo
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